Rape and Regret:
Construction and Reconstruction of the
Molested Girl in Popular Culture
The fictive female victim must be a compelling figure or the brutal reality
of her assault can destroy interest in a tale centered around rape. Modem popular
culture, in particular, has addressed this issue with the creation of the victim as
villain in the myth of the nymphet, the sexually compelling female child who
should not yet be touched but who inspires sexual feelings anyway. She is fresh,
flm and safe, pretty to look at, and reminds everyone of their younger days. She
is a popular topic in literature, in movies, and on catwalks and has a welldocumented history as the child overwhelmed and then silenced by the bmtal
forces of modem society. Three icons of popular literature in particular—
Nabokov’s Lolita, Georges Bataille’s Marcelle, and Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth
Salander—can be used to show this process at work and help track both the
inception and evolution of the popular image of the raped girl as both the muted
victim and the vamp in terms of mainstream ideology.
After being silenced by the men who made them, Delores, Marcelle, and
Lisbeth still have something left to say about the popular understanding of the
molested girl. Delores (Lolita) Haze, Nabokov’s famous nymphet, is so stifled
that we refer to her by her rapist’s nickname rather than her given one. She lies
dead on white sheets with prenatal blood drying between her legs. Marcelle,
Georges Bataille’s adolescent suicide in Story o f the Eye, was once a “ravishing
blond girl”; she now swings from a rope in a wardrobe where she died, pissing
on herself in the process. Only Lisbeth Salander, The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo, escapes, but she no longer wants to tell her story now that all the lies are
exposed. After dispatching their duties as sirens dispelling and explaining the
nightmare moments of the men who made them, these girls leave indelible
marks on our imaginations. Like little kids poking at a dead squirrel, we keep
worrying over the raped girls’ remains. The perfectly innocent victim, the
nymphet seems to possess our guilt whether we watched or participated. Just by
existing, these “shes” seem to express dread in a way that keeps us aware of our
own inescapable regrets.
Siren: to squeal, to scream, to cry out, a temptress, a charmer and a sexpot.
In fiction the little girl is a sexless creature, a mysterious entity with fallow
powers. Is it her youth, her femininity, her shape, the length of her hair, her
hemline, her smell, the way she curls up on a couch, or the way she walks
barefoot that reminds us of a failure to protect and that compels us to reflect on
how many times we have been exposed when we preferred privacy? We
definitely see her in pieces, for as a young girl, she is a bit of a blank page and
what reflects back off the whiteness obliges us to keep writing about and reading